Apology for Her
by jomiddlemarch
Summary: On the merits of representation, in all its variety.


He found Mary poring over Lisette's latest sketches, the leather folio opened upon the long walnut table in the library that the staff used for meals and whatever leisure the War afforded them. Lisette liked the clean light from the long windows, had murmured Gallicly about the northern exposure, _bien sur_ , and could be found in the afternoons refining her work from her observations on the wards to an ever-receding standard; she never left the room without a frown, but she frowned so prettily the tired orderlies and Hale, even irritable McBurney rushed to her side to offer what they thought passed for consolation. Jed did not. The finished plates in an expensive text would not be flecked with blood or the filthy, oily smear of gunpowder from a boy's flailing fist, but the original sketches were still perceptible in what Lisette accepted as complete though they were altered, as if seen through a strong German lens. He wasn't sure what Lisette did with her rough drawings and knew he could never ask her, even if he'd been willing to agree to her entreaty that they resume their previous entanglement; some questions were beyond answers.

Mary was still in a way he'd not seen before and Jed realized his every memory of her was of action, always Mary on a quest for something, a dented tin cup to fill, the last of the quinine, the perfect verse from Psalms to soothe a man who hadn't lost his sturdy child's faith amid the War's utter disruption. Now she was not doing anything but breathing lightly and looking, her forehead furrowed a little, until she lifted the heavy paper to see what lay beneath and then regained her stance like a marble sylph in a formal Parisian garden. There was vivid color in her cheeks and her lips were reddened; one of the doxies would have used paint to get the effect but Mary had probably bitten her lips while she was thinking. He should leave her and let her have her rare solitude without interruption, but he was a greedy, selfish man, hardly as good as he meant to be, not nearly so good as she made him out and he spoke even as he knew he ought not.

"What do you make of them?"

"They are so fine, so very fine. I cannot help but wonder at her talent, what an eye she has!" Mary said. Jed hardly paused to take in her tone, responded as he would have to Eliza or any woman of his acquaintance, save perhaps Lisette herself.

"You've nothing to be ashamed of, Mary. Your own drawings, the ones you've shown me, they're every bit her equal."

He was watching her hands as he spoke as he couldn't see her eyes with her face turned toward the sketches, but she touched the paper here and there, her fingers as delicate as when she cleaned a dehisced incision or counted the black silk stitches in a man's throat through the scruff of unshaven whiskers. He hadn't thought she would laugh when he spoke, but she did, a rich, full laugh as if he'd made some fatuously gallant remark at a ball or even over-praised an overcooked roast at their dinner table.

"Oh, Jed! Come now. There is no comparison and I shouldn't want one. These are something uncommon, she's managed such beauty where I didn't think I could see it at all- there is nothing at all obvious except her skill and her art…My sketchbook is nothing like and perhaps I want it that way," Mary replied.

He stepped closer to look where she did. Lisette couldn't be faulted, though she faulted herself unceasingly— here was accuracy and yet something more, a vivacity that he knew of flesh as a surgeon, how it never yielded until death had set in and even then, the lifeless form clung to the animating spirit it had just lost, the last breath always a sigh. The Parisienne wielded her brush and pen with such strength no one could think a woman had been the painter but he'd seen Morisot's work in Paris and so he knew Lisette was not unique but he couldn't argue with Mary's assertion. He tried to gather himself, to collect his thoughts into a question or an remark Mary would not only be pleased with but intrigued by, that would keep her here with him now but it seemed he didn't need to as Mary spoke again into the warm, generous silence that was between them.

"I can hardly look away—there is Johnny Caldwell and she's got him as if she'd studied his face since he was born, there, see—that line there, that is the same curve that his mother would know from when she held his head to her breast to nurse him and that sleepy look in his eye, just the same as when he was a boy, trying to stay awake for Father Christmas. You see, don't you? You must, Jed. Oh, they are so beautiful and so terrible…though I suppose only terrible to us. When the book is made, no one reading it will have known the men and they won't be struck so, as we are," Mary said, tracing something with a fingertip in the corner of the page, where Lisette had nestled her signature, like the unspooling of a black thread, an errant suture.

"Do you think so?" he asked.

He was curious to hear more from her and to hear as well how she spoke, confident as well as considering, how she allowed herself to be a little unsure, to circle back and find what she thought was most true, without any pretense or charming self-deprecation. It was not the elegant wit of the salon or the practiced exchange of the university seminar; she must always have found her way with a book as a guide or the passing guidance of whomever was unusual enough to tutor a woman as a man would be taught. Mary was unfairly hindered but he thought few would notice; not many would be willing to listen to her talk thus and the ones that would were likely to be distracted by the quick brilliance of her conversation and wouldn't consider what she struggled against. He wondered if she had been able to talk to her husband like this, if they had spent their evenings discussing what she had read or how his experiment progressed, a conversation that was lively and productive, full of ideas they both wished to express and revise, a shared quest, a friendly challenge, the appropriate precursor to a true intimacy of mind first and then the oh-so willing body.

"To have nursed these same men and then to see their broken bodies, their suffering made into some so pure, when you and I both know there is nothing of purity about disease and injury, it's the furthest thing truly…I can't think we could respond to the drawings as a stranger would and I find, I wish I could see them that way as well and know what that was like," she said.

It was much harder for him, he thought, he had little experience with looking at paintings, had drawn nothing but a few poor surgical diagrams to serve as notes for himself. But Mary drew herself and had let him look at her sketchbook; reflecting, he did notice the work of the women affected him quite differently and he wondered why, what Mary thought. He was discovering he liked asking questions even more than having the answers, at least with such a companion as this uncommon Baroness, lovely Mary with her lovely, inquisitive mind.

"You said, about your own work, that you shouldn't want it to be like these—what did you mean?"

He might come back to what she'd just said, about wishing to be able to see the drawings as if she'd never been to the War, to see if it meant she regretted her service, her vocation, or only wanted to know more, as she seemed to desire in so many regards, or maybe she had tried to convey some other message and he, clumsier than he wanted to be, had missed it or misconstrued, no better than Hale hacking about a boy's ruptured belly.

"Oh, my drawings—I suppose I mean they are selfish in a way Mlle. Beaufort's never are, that I drew only for myself and I am too much in them where these," she said, gesturing before her, "these were made by a gifted hand but the soul was… withdrawn to such a height, to be able to see the man, the experience with a context that has always eluded me."

"Selfish? I can't agree with you, Mary. I think you're the least selfish person I've met and what I've seen of your drawing has never struck me as selfish," Jed replied, sure for once in this exchange that he was right and he heard that in his voice. Mary did too, and smiled at him for it.

"You always overestimate me, me and perhaps everyone around you, I think, Jed. My drawing is limited, technically that is apparent to even the untutored eye, but well beyond that—what I have made hasn't the impersonality real art requires. I suppose I have never forgotten myself in the room, in the scene as I drew afterward. They are pictures that take and don't give, not as Mlle. Beaufort's do," she said, gently amused with him, uncompromising in her assessment of her deficits.

"Perhaps it is that you may only see your work as the artist, the memory of making it overlaid, whereas I only see what you have made. How complete even in the unfinished story and there is a tenderness you have for your subject, in every drawing there is such care… and I don't see that in Lisette, Mlle. Beaufort's work," he said.

Mary had shown him the wards, filthy and shining, the nuns individual, not the flock he always saw, the old, tired wisdom of Summers's gaze and Matron's keen glance, wiser still, her lashes as long as a girl's. There had been little Emma, her skirts narrow without the treacherous, fashionable hoops and her mouth, so pretty in a smile, so much more beautiful in sorrow, her jaw taut with grief, and Henry Hopkins ablaze in his small pulpit, like a man from Blake and not the far, flat reaches of Lake Erie. And himself, to see himself in her drawings, his hands more miraculous than when he awoke to them on the counterpane, his dark eyes enigmatic but so kind, the remembered weakness of his withdrawal in the line of his throat above the cravat, the dominant figure in every scene, rooms he couldn't remember for she had been there and wasn't, was a ghost in every grouping. The world without Mary—he couldn't like it but it moved him in a way Lisette's drawings, which missed no one, never could. Everything Mary drew was dear to her and nothing Lisette drew was—but would that be a compliment or an insult? He wasn't an artist to know and he didn't want to presume, he wanted to know and to know how to say it, laughing or serious with his hand on her wrist, the cuff drawn back, no bracelet, no lace, just perfectly arranged flesh and bone, tendon and ligament and lumbrical, a masterpiece of complexity that seemed simple as she turned to let him bring it to his lips.

"As I said before, Jed, I think you are too generous with me," Mary replied. She intended to be well-mannered, self-deprecating, to deflect his attention but he thought of what he wanted to give, what she went without, without complaint. He couldn't keep the edge from his tone, couldn't keep the words, spiked and sharp against his tongue, jarring his teeth.

"No, Mary. That isn't so, not at all. You mustn't believe it, you mustn't tell either of us such a lie."

She looked very closely at him then. He had changed the tenor of the discussion, a hard hand upon the tiller, and steered them straight into a storm when he saw what she had wanted was a summery idyll, to look at Lisette's pictures and dream, to be removed as the artist was, a retreat to another time and place, another Mary. The Baroness in Boston? The New Hampshire lass or some future that she daren't articulate to herself, the wife in the marriage bed, waking to a hand on a bare hip, a mouth at the nape of her neck, the mother in a rocking chair with the fire lazy in the coals, the shifting gold and amber on her baby's sleeping face, mistress of the house, the scholar in her study, sketching arcs, parabolas, marshaling numbers to fit on a maple leaf's veins.

"I try to tell the truth, Jed," she said softly. She did, he could admit that, but it wasn't all.

"When it suits you, madam, yes, you do."

"Well, it's easiest then, isn't it?" she remarked evenly.

"That isn't what you care about, what's easy. If I know anything, I know that," he said and he could think of a hundred examples, a thousand, and he couldn't help thinking of when he'd laid his head in her lap and wished for the needle, to die of it, to claw himself out of this life and into another and had only been able to retch, his belly on fire from the vomiting he'd already done, and Mary had crooned some nameless song, the refrain a glimpse of the faithful moon in the dark night, "hush, my little love, my little dove, hush-a-bye, hush." She hadn't drawn that and he wished she had though he couldn't have ever been able to look at it.

"God help us if you should ever be wrong, Jedediah," she said.

He had a sudden, thrilling urge to push all the heavy drawings from the table and press her against the wood's bevel- to kiss her mouth and try to make her swoon, his arm behind her to catch her, to keep her from being tumbled, held close so he could tell if her heart beat as fast as his, if she would cling to him and call him Jedediah again _oh Jedediah, oh my dearest_ in the last breath she could manage before he kissed her.

His face must have shown something of it for he saw the reflection in hers, her brown eyes so dark, her lips parted, her hand lifted from the table and held against her waist, to steady herself within the shell of the stays, to push him away or draw him closer? He felt such regret that they could share so little of the joy they had in each other, always needing to conceal and misdirect, to talk about inventories and schedules, even now, cleverness and contemplation necessary instead of the simplest words _I love_ and _oh yes_ , _mine_ and _finally_. _My darling_. To be alone was a risk—of interruption, of discovery, compromise or confession, and yet he wanted it so, with any pretext. If he reached out his hand to her, he thought, he knew she would come to him and that afterward, she would not look at him and she would not ask for anything at all. He thought of that and what there was now and decided he would rather have her regard than her passion, the smallest, homeliest hope and not a corrosive remorse.

"I expect He's fairly occupied, but it seems He can very well spare you as a deputy, to put me right," he quipped, to change what was between them to something they could have. She was delighted by him, with rather more surprise than was flattering, but to see that sunny smile! He would have liked Lisette to see Mary thus, to draw her, a little enameled portrait he could winkle away and keep in the pocket of his vest.

"So, I'm to be Head Nurse and the Lord's deputy… and what else? Shall I be the Baroness again, who ought to prepare a groaning table? I expect you have something in mind, you always do," she retorted. She matched him, the move to repartee suiting them both, the need to avoid anything more hazardous, more honest, the most pressing even if it remained the most tempting.

"Only Mary, only be Mary—not for me but for yourself, speak with her voice, look with her eyes. You could not do better than that," he said because he could not say otherwise. Lisette could draw something more nuanced, a portrait of a woman with every loveliness, even with the loveliest flaws, but he was not an artist nor a poet. He was skilled at repair, divining the damage, its degree and extent, and salvaging it, but she needed none of that expertise. If she cared for him, he thought it was because he looked for a problem, for mysteries and secrets, the ones she sought in her numbers and drawings, and in that way, they were kindred. She had already found a man like that before, but for him, she was the rarest creature. He repeated himself, "You could not do better than that, Mary."

"If I listened to half of what you said…I have learned now, though, haven't I, how to construe your meaning. And when I haven't, well then, the sketchbook beckons, that I may let my hand show me before I have comprehended you fully." She pulled the cover closed on the folio and left her hand resting atop it. "I cannot look at these any longer, not now. Perhaps another time…perhaps she will draw something else that we may regard together and discuss, squaring our perception instead of merely doubling it."

"I hope so. Very much," he replied. He let himself imagine it for a moment, sitting together, Mary in his arms and a drawing, intricate and exquisite, in her hands, to be so used to holding her that he could attend to the picture and not only the woman, his companion, his heart's dearest. "I shouldn't care for an intrusion now and the requisite explanations, you know how Nurse Hastings has an unearthly sense of where she is least wanted—and how often she finds her way there," he added then paused, sure it would not be quite enough to persuade her to leave, to walk out with him. "Young Isaac has been looking for you, I believe he's been sent to your clinic or the kitchen. Shall we find him?"

"I shall. You shan't, you have work going begging and a Chief Medical Officer who is not so lenient as before. Away with you," she scolded him, her merriment softened with her friendly admiration, her concern, all the sweetest kindness he would never deserve from her—but always want, much as she would always seek a blank page in her book, to make something more beautiful out of what there was before her. She did not see how she made it so, her eye and mind and heart, but he liked to think it would take a long time to convince her and that perseverance was at least one trait of his that was widely agreed upon.


End file.
